Even Stars Burn
by roberre
Summary: The candle didn't look like Rum, and it didn't smell like him—he was always leather or aftershave, silver polish or the spicy scent of magic—but she could talk to it because at least it didn't stammer condolences, or pretend to grieve over a man it never knew.


A/N: Written both as a post 3x11 catharsis, and as a Rumbelle Secret Santa prompt for my newest friend, Batman! aka: the capeandcowlconspiracy on tumblr.

Sorry not sorry for exploiting everyone's emotional vulnerability during this difficult time.

* * *

Belle climbed.

A lantern in one hand and skirts held up in the other, she ascended the stairs of a too-familiar tower, until the world seemed distant. Through arrow slits and crumbling stone, she could see the sides of mountains, hear the tiny snorts of her grey horse hobbled in the courtyard below. Every step rang familiar as an old song, every echo of shoes on cool stone part of a tune she could never leave behind. She remembered the pulse of the castle well enough to recognize its silence.

In time, the staircase ended. Stale air gave way to a cool mountain breeze, and she stepped onto warped wooden floorboards. Lamplight spilled over grey bricks, over tumbled stacks of weather-ruined books, over crooked and fallen shelves. A tattered chair, a rotting rug. A single wooden table that stands, defiantly whole, by a broken window.

The tower roof must have fallen in long ago, because Belle picked her way across rubble in full view of the autumn stars.

When she arrived at the lone table, she set her lamp down. She reached into the cloth bag hanging by her hip. Her fingers closed over cool wax. Putting her body between the table and the broken window, Belle did her best to block the wind in a room without a roof. A moment later, a single red candle burned in the centre of the table.

She took a breath.

"So, Rumple, it's been a year." She watched the floor beyond the flames, patches of cloud shadows skimming across the dark wood, black on black. She ran her tongue over her lips, mouth suddenly dry. "And—well—I still miss you. Though I suppose you probably could have guessed that."

She stared into the dancing fire. She glanced up to the stars. She tried to speak, but the noises that leave her lips sounded hollow. There were too many words, and there were no words. Her grief was a crumbled roof and the wail of the wind across the tops of mountains.

"This is the first time I've been back," she admitted. "And it's not easy. It's not holding together very well without you." She smiled, nearly laughed. "Then again, neither am I."

'As well as can be expected', everyone said. And on the outside, it was true enough. Smiles, even if they didn't quite touch her eyes. Words, even if they skirted around the open wound and her empty heart. Acting the part, accepting the sympathy, moving on.

Crying herself to sleep.

The candle didn't look like Rum, and it didn't smell like him—he was always leather or aftershave, silver polish or the spicy scent of magic—but she could talk to it because at least it didn't stammer condolences, or pretend to grieve over a man it never knew.

"I still hear you sometimes, you know. You used to hum a silly little tune while you worked, if you thought nobody was listening." She could hear it when she closed her eyes. And when she sat by the river. And when she saw a spinning wheel. "You're quieter than you used to be. And I've stopped expecting you around every corner. Though I don't know if it means I'm moving on or just forgetting."

Even now, she could hear footsteps echoing, the slow march of a memory up the winding stairs.

Only, the footsteps didn't stop. They didn't fade like the sound of quiet humming. They grew stronger against the wind, steady and far too real to dismiss.

For a moment, her heart swelled. Old wounds bled. Hope leapt up, consuming everything in its path. A torch appeared—but when the man emerged behind it, his shoulders were too broad, and his hair was too short, and his movements too casual. And Rumple really wasn't around every corner because Rumple was gone.

"Bae," Belle said.

Bae swiveled around at the sound of her voice, cloak flurrying and torch crackling with the motion. A quick smile, a flash of teeth. "Hey," he said. He slid his torch into a bracket somehow still attached to a half-crumbled wall. The heavy nighttime silence cracked into splinters along with rotten roof beams. "I thought I'd find you up here."

Belle spread her hands. Encompassing the candle, the wind, the toppled books. "You thought right."

He looked around the room with tight eyes and an expression that seemed all creases. His forehead wrinkled. His hands slid down his sides, a gesture obviously intended for clothes with pockets. Finding none, he wrung his hands together. "This for him?"

Belle nodded.

"Do you want me to leave you alone?" he asked.

"No, it's okay." A pause, and then, "I think he'd want you to stay."

His voice, which was always husky, grew positively hoarse. "Okay." He made a point of not looking at the candle. Another flash of a smile, directed at the floor.

"I didn't mean to guilt you," Belle said. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," he said. A few awkward steps over rubble, and he stood by the toppled bookshelves. He pulled a book off the floor and flipped through it, hands looking too-big and too-awkward in their leather gauntlets. He rustled the pages and turned the book sideways to peer at what looks like a ruined illustration.

Belle tried to force a smile. "It's just—it's good to have the company. No one else understands."

"Yeah, well, my old man wasn't always the friendliest neighbor." He paused, hoarse voice cracking into a whisper. He cleared his throat and tossed the book onto the floor. Belle could see the rotten paper, the remnants of running, bleeding ink.

She wanted to comfort him. Because he lost his father. Because they were the only ones left. But she didn't move out from the ring of candlelight, and Bae only made another attempt to shove his hand into phantom pockets.

"He—he did change, you know," Belle said slowly, turning back to the candle. A puddle of melted wax trembled in the light of the flame. Red and orange, dancing in a shimmering surface. "It took a long time, and I know you didn't always see it, but he _was_ trying."

She watched him turn over her words in his mind, the same way he turned over toppled books with the toe of his boot. Wading through decomposing pages to dredge up a response. In the end, he only managed a quiet, "He did what he had to do."

She bit her lip. "He loved you very much. I hope you know that."

Bae began to pace, slowly, arms crossed and cape fluttering behind him. His boots crunched on rubble and ruined books alike.

Silence tried to smother them, as if the abandoned castle resented the sudden return of life. The wind blew. The candle's tiny flame flickered. Belle's eyes dropped to watch as droplets of red spilled over the top and onto the table. Wax glistened like blood in the darkness.

A broken chunk of stone wall suddenly skittered across the floor, drawing her attention. Bae followed it a moment later, stepping into the ring of candle light for the first time. His voice affected a level of casualness his posture couldn't quite match.

"So, this one time, we were just sitting on the deck on Hook's ship—not really talking about anything, right?" He licked his lips and flashed a smile at her, then bent to pick up the stone. "All the sudden he starts spouting all this poetic stuff about true love. Oceans of darkness and flickers of light, romantic nonsense like that."

Belle's lips quirked, eyebrows raising. "Romantic nonsense?"

"At one point, he looks at me and says, verbatim—" Bae smoothed his face to a solemn stare, taking on a subtle, familiar accent –"'You're my happy ending Bae… but without her, I have nothing'." Bae's smile returned, genuine this time. He tucked his hand under his arms and shrugged. "I mean, I'd heard he had a girlfriend… but I didn't know he was that crazy about you. I couldn't shut him up. He talked about you the whole way home."

"He never said much about his past," Belle said. "But when he did, it was usually about you."

He didn't need to talk. Belle could see his love for his son in the little things—the yearly vigils, the tenderness with which he wore the golden shawl, the sad little smile that glinted in his eye when he saw children kicking around a tattered soccer ball. The way his hands shook and his lips curled when he said the name 'Bae'.

"For a lot of years, we only had each other," Bae said.

For a lot of years, they were alone. That, he didn't say.

Belle smiled. "I've never seen him happier than when he found you again."

"You know, my dad made a lot of bad decisions in his life…" Bae's voice cracked, and he flung an outstretched arm towards Belle before continuing, "but it's nice to know he made at least one good one."

His words spilled tears down her face, and she quickly wiped them away with her palms. "He wanted to be loved. And in the end, he was."

"In a way, he got his happy ending after all." Bae smiled. The expression couldn't hide his sadness, or the way he scrubbed at his eyes as he glanced to the floor. "I guess he was the lucky one."

Belle swallowed hard. "I miss him so much."

'Miss' was an understatement. The loss of him weighed in the pit of her stomach, an uncompromising boulder she could never leave behind. Only a year had passed, and already she nursed three hundred and sixty five scars carved into her heart.

"I have a lot of practice not missing him," Bae said. He stepped closer, and slid his hand onto the table across from hers. "It'll get easier, Belle. I promise."

She pursed her lips and placed her hand over his. "I know."

When he finally pulled his hand away, he left the small stone lying on the table. It was just a piece of rubble, a broken shard of rock casting a broken shadow—but a candle was just wax, and stars were just fire, and memorials didn't always have to make sense. Carefully, slowly, she picked up the stone and placed it in line with the candle.

Bae cleared his throat and glanced up to the sky, acting as if the stone was an accident and his eyes were watering on account of the wind. "So, uh—when you're done, I heard Granny's perfected her chimera burger recipe." He smiled without looking at her, glancing over his shoulder to the torch still burning on the wall. "She's a couple day's ride away, but it's probably worth it."

Belle bit her lip, blue eyes flicking between the candle and Bae's face.

"Come _on_," he says. "My treat."

He looked nothing like Rumplestiltskin. He spoke differently and moved differently, joking where Rumple was silent and casual where Rumple was deliberate. He shrugged and twitched smiles for a hundred different occasions. He wore stubble on his cheeks, where Rumple shaved every day. But they had the same dark eyes. And she hadn't eaten a decent hamburger in a year.

"Alright," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." Belle nodded, hitching up her cloak around her neck to block out the chill. "I'll be down in a minute."

"Take your time," Bae said. "I'll wait for you at the bottom."

Without preamble, Bae crossed the room, snatching his torch from the bracket before starting down the stairs at a steady trot.

When his footsteps faded to echoes, she picked lantern from the floor and set it on the table beside the candle. In comparison, the flame seemed tiny, bathed in the brighter light. The shadows slipped away, and the vibrant colour of the wax washed out. The tiny stone looked to tremble in the light.

After wiping away another spill of tears, Belle forced a thin smile and ran her palm along the edge of the table, as if to smooth out the snarls of the weather worn wood. Maybe rough wood wasn't scales and wasn't skin, but it was rough and textured and layered and real. And it was here.

"Well," she said quietly, between a sigh and a smile, "I guess I have to go."

Loneliness tried to sink into her bones. She knew it well- the feeling of cold pavement on bruised knee, of a bullet tearing through sinew and bone. It pointed and laughed at the cavity where her heart no longer beat. She watched hot tears hit the floor, spatter against her soft boots with tiny deadened 'thuds'. She pulled her cloak closer, arms crossed under her breasts. The gesture helped dislodge snarled words from her throat.

"I—I hope you don't think I broke my deal. I stayed with you as close to forever as I could manage."

A song seemed to float up from the stairwell, a haunting, familiar tune sung by a man who thought no-one was listening.

"I love you, Rumple," Belle said quietly. She smiled into the flame, then licked her fingertips and pinched the wick, leaving an afterimage seared in her vision.

It died in a puff of smoke and golden light.

Her brave little candle went out like a star.

"I'll see you next year."


End file.
